Disclaimer: I’ve been away from computers all week and experiencing some pretty amazing stuff, so…. this is undoubtly going to be a very long blog. I’m also exhausted and therefore in a slightly strange and goofy mood. I’m going to start writing tonight, but probably won’t finish. I’ll split it up into sections according to where we were… for your viewing pleasure of course! (and my writing)
I am going to once again affirm my love for this program and tell you how much I’m learning and thinking so I don’t have to say it about everything we did this week, because it was absolutely amazing…
So on Saturday morning we set out with Anne, the director of the programs here to Cortes’ palace which is in downtown Cuernavaca. The museum has a bunch of different things, but we were mainly there to see Diego Rivera’s mural which depicts the conquest and a little bit of the Mexican revolution. It’s a beautiful mural and gives a really great sense of the progression of the conquest and then a small part of the revolution of 1910.
HUITZILAC
After that we set off in the vans for Huitzilac, a small rural town with indigenous routes up in the mountains in the pass in between Mexico City and Cuernavaca. We were up at around 10,000 feet so it was a bit chilly, but very very beautiful. We first spoke to an elder of the village who told us the story of how Huitzilac was named (it means hummingbird). It was a really interesting story so I’ll get it up if I get a chance to type it up. He was a very cute and wise old man who also spoke to us about the concept of history. He has written two books where he goes to the source of the history, oral tradition or direct experience, and writes his books off of that history.
After that talk we went to the community center where we were to meet up with the host families we would be staying with for two nights. I was really nervous about my Spanish, the food, what my family would be like, their house and everything else, especially when we all got there and everyone was standing around awkwardly. The concept of time is much more relaxed here so not much starts right on time. It’s kind of nice though.
It ended up that I, and another girl in my program, Natalie were staying with the brother of the man we spoke with earlier in the afternoon. He was a very nice older man, but Natalie and I got very nervous when he didn’t know how long we were staying or what the disinfectant for fruits and veggies was for. He took us back to his house, which was pretty modest, but very comfortable. We all sat around the table for a while in silence which was very awkward. It was very hard for both Natalie and I to understand his Spanish so it was hard to carry on a conversation.
He never married and we were worried the whole two days was going to be like this. A little bit later his niece came home though and she lives in the same house with him with her family to take care of him. Her husband, 2 daughters and her grandson also lived in the same house. We were relieved when she came home and seemed to have a much better idea of what was going on. It was hard to understand her also, but not as difficult as before and she was very welcoming and friendly towards us. She made us dinner which were like deep fried quesadillas. They were really good, but it was a little bit of a guessing game because they all had different fillings in them. We talked a little more before Natalie and I were exhausted and retreated into our room at 8.
The next day we had a huge breakfast of tamales dulce (every meal was huge)and a hot drink made from corn called atolé. They make different flavors of it. We first had guayaba which is a small, sweet and a bit tart fruit I really like. Tamales Dulce are some sort of grain and sugar in corn husks and cooked. They were very good, though pink and I couldn’t figure out why.
We spent the morning with a group of students from a local high school, talking to them and then hiking up a super super steep path in the biological corridor. It was all loose dirt and a really wide path because it separated the two states of Mexico and Morelos (where Cuernavaca is) and also to stop a forest fire from spreading further. It was a short, but very difficult hike up, but we were rewarded with gorgeous views on all sides. Victor spoke to us about environmental issues and then we hurried down to make it back in time for lunch with our families. I pretty much ran the whole way down in switchbacks because if you tried to go slow it was like surfing in dirt and your shoes would fill with first.
COCK FIGHT
We had lunch with our families. Natalie and I went to a barbeque of lamb at Don Delfino’s house (the brother of our host), which was really delicious. After that our host mother was asking if we wanted to go somewhere and saying “muerto,” which I new meant death, “gallo,” which I didn’t know and “hijo,” which meant son. So we were very confused but nodded our heads in agreement anyway (we got really good at this). So we walk up and it’s like we’re walking into someone’s backyard and there are these two girls that say “15 pesos,” but my host mother said something really quick and we just went in. This is where the real shock was. There were mostly men, maybe a few women, all huddled around a large pen fenced in with wood. Inside the pen two men were pressing roosters faces together in the middle of the pen. One of the men was our host mother’s son. It was a really interesting atmosphere, everyone was very excited and eating and drinking and to the left there was a guy counting out money, and to the right a man announcing things threw a microphone. It was really crowded and Natalie and I sure stood out, being one of few women and also the only gringas.
The roosters (gallos!) wear these hooks around their legs and then they jump all over each other. It was really sad because they get really bloody from poking each other with the hooks. Everyone was cheering and I was trying really hard not to cringe and be that American who didn’t understand. We’ve talked a lot about being culturally relative and sensitive, but it’s hard to think about that in relation to something like animal cruelty.
Anyway, if one of the roosters gets too close to the other one’s neck then they separate them because if they get stabbed in the neck then they die right away. It’s like rounds in wrestling and in between one I saw them take a capful of Gatorade and poor it on the rooster’s head! Then they have it some to drink, which I thought was really hilarious. We asked about it later and they said, oh, it needs electrolytes. So I think Gatorade has a new commercial… Eventually the other rooster could no longer be made to stand up so they pronounced the son of my host mother the winner. He won a portion of the money that people had bet on his rooster winning. Before each rooster fight, the men show of their roosters and try to get everyone to bet on them. The next fight, the rooster’s neck got stepped on and it died right away, which was really bloody… then we left.
In the afternoon we had a lecture about environment from someone from the municipal government of the town. There’s basically two governments, the municipal which is what we would typically consider government and is more formal and then the communales, which is a group of leadership from the community that has been around for way longer than the formal government has. There is definitely a bit of a power struggle and tension between the two.
That night was better with the family because they both opened up more and it was quieter so we had more of a chance to just sit around and talk. After dinner we had quite an interesting shower experience. It was pouring rain, but we needed to go to her father’s house (Don Delfino’s) to take a shower because they didn’t have running water. The houses are neighbors.. kind of. Usually to get from on the other you need to walk around the block, but since it was raining we took a short cut… kind of. We went up stairs in the house and then out on the roof, across the roof, down a ladder, through a backyard and workshop and then finally into the house for a nice hot shower.
The next day we all loaded up into the back of a truck with a few of the students
from the day before and a bunch of tools to do some community service project with the communales (the other sector of gov). We went higher up into the mountains where it was freeeezing. There was even ice on the ground!! All of the men we worked with were men that use the land, to farm, harvesting dirt, or in other ways so they have to work to give back to it in order to get a permit they need to use the land. Each has a certain amount of area they have to maintain each week, by digging fire trenches and planting trees. We dug out a wide path so if a fire starts, it won’t got far. It was really hard work, but interesting to hear from all the men and so beautiful.
We finished quicker than expected so went to this holy place with lakes in the
mountains for a little bit, just to hang out. It was really cheap to ride horses so a bunch of us all went for a ride on paths around in the mountains for about forty-five minutes. It was so beautiful and I’d never really ridden a horse before! Only ponies…
Then we had a community lunch because it was the opening of a new community center/ theater of the communales. There was lots of live music and good food and almost the whole town came out. And lots of tequila of course… A priest also blessed the area with holy water.
AMATLAN
And then we were off to Amatlan which I think is probably my favorite place that we have been yet. It’s a little bit lower, but still in the mountains and really really beautiful, with reddish rocks kind of like the South West towering up from all the mountains that surround the small town. It’s a really gorgeous and supposedly sacred healing place. There aren’t really pictures because we were told it was considered somewhat offensive to take pictures since they consider it a real “taking” of something of the land and the people who live there. I saw this play out in mixed ways though, sometimes it really seemed so and other times people would say, take a picture, take a picture.
The family Natalie and I were with was really nice and their Spanish was much easier to understand. They also had a really nice house with running water, which was quite a luxury. It all seemed fairly new so I think it was partly from money from working in the states. It was a woman named Lucina, her husband Antonio and her two son. Antonio had worked in Atlanta and in Canada and one of her sons had just gotten home for the Christmas season, but was about to go back to Los Angeles to work again.
Hearing stories about immigration and them walking through the desserts for three nights made it all hit really home. I knew it all happened before, but to have faces and names and stories makes me think about it all in such a different way.
We went to a party for a holiday that was that day at our host mother’s sister’s house. There was great live music, good food and it just a really great atmosphere. We stayed up pretty late talking with them about all different things. I felt much more at home there, which was a relief because I was so exhausted from the homestay before. Speaking Spanish either way is really tiring though, so we couldn’t stay up to late and were off to bed soon.
After I had been there for about three hours they started asking us what we were doing on Saturday. Natalie was going to Acapulco, but I wasn’t doing anything so I got invited to a wedding on Saturday. The culture here is very different. It’s only rude to bring uninvited guests if you bring more than five or so, other than that everyone just plans for a ton of people.
In the morning we talked with this man Nacho about indigenous rights and other issues facing the town, which was very interesting. Then we went to the fields on a women named Dona Irene who is very old and never married, but still plants her lands each year. After that we hiked up to the sacred spot in the mountains where two rocks meet. Nacho led us in a ceremony that was suppose to allow up to absorb all of the good energy of nature. I could really feel the tingling in my arms, it was so strange, comforting and relaxing all at the same time.
That night our host mother shower us how she makes money, which is by making boxes out of dried orange peels. They were beautiful, decorated with dried flowers. I painted a little bit, which they seemed interested in and then we talked about all different animals and I drew a few things to give her ideas for her boxes.
HACIENDA
We didn’t have much time in the morning, just enough to say goodbye and have breakfast (which is actually a huge meal) before setting off to Xoxicalco, which is an important archaeological site further South. It was beautiful and really impressive, especially the parts about the observatory and scientific calculations that they can’t even do today!
Then we were off to the hacienda, which was… finally… our break! The hacienda is huge and very very old. It kind of felt like something out of Disney world, like a colonial theme, but it wasn’t crowded and it was all actually realllly old. It was all built around the 1500s! After the revolution of 1910 many haciendas were sold because they were destroyed in the war and because the whole cause of the war was to take land ownership away from a small percent of the population
that did not rightfully own in the first place. It was a bunch of old buildings and then behind sweeping fields of mostly sugar cane under the mountains. It was so gorgeous. We had sessions in the morning, but the afternoons were left for us to relax by the pool and do other activities. There was a climbing wall, so I got to do that a little bit which was fun.
Both mornings Betsy and I went on the most amazing run ever. I hadn’t exercised in a while, but it felt so great to run (helped it was flat too). I ran for like an hour and 15 minutes, which was probably about seven miles… and it felt so good. The sun was rising up over the mountains and everything was so beautiful.
It was nice to return back home to Cuernavaca and Casa CEMAL, which has really begun to feel like home. It was relaxing, though Betsy and I woke up early the next morning to take a bus to la boda (the wedding) in Amatlan.
I am going to once again affirm my love for this program and tell you how much I’m learning and thinking so I don’t have to say it about everything we did this week, because it was absolutely amazing…
So on Saturday morning we set out with Anne, the director of the programs here to Cortes’ palace which is in downtown Cuernavaca. The museum has a bunch of different things, but we were mainly there to see Diego Rivera’s mural which depicts the conquest and a little bit of the Mexican revolution. It’s a beautiful mural and gives a really great sense of the progression of the conquest and then a small part of the revolution of 1910.
HUITZILAC
After that we set off in the vans for Huitzilac, a small rural town with indigenous routes up in the mountains in the pass in between Mexico City and Cuernavaca. We were up at around 10,000 feet so it was a bit chilly, but very very beautiful. We first spoke to an elder of the village who told us the story of how Huitzilac was named (it means hummingbird). It was a really interesting story so I’ll get it up if I get a chance to type it up. He was a very cute and wise old man who also spoke to us about the concept of history. He has written two books where he goes to the source of the history, oral tradition or direct experience, and writes his books off of that history.
After that talk we went to the community center where we were to meet up with the host families we would be staying with for two nights. I was really nervous about my Spanish, the food, what my family would be like, their house and everything else, especially when we all got there and everyone was standing around awkwardly. The concept of time is much more relaxed here so not much starts right on time. It’s kind of nice though.
It ended up that I, and another girl in my program, Natalie were staying with the brother of the man we spoke with earlier in the afternoon. He was a very nice older man, but Natalie and I got very nervous when he didn’t know how long we were staying or what the disinfectant for fruits and veggies was for. He took us back to his house, which was pretty modest, but very comfortable. We all sat around the table for a while in silence which was very awkward. It was very hard for both Natalie and I to understand his Spanish so it was hard to carry on a conversation.
He never married and we were worried the whole two days was going to be like this. A little bit later his niece came home though and she lives in the same house with him with her family to take care of him. Her husband, 2 daughters and her grandson also lived in the same house. We were relieved when she came home and seemed to have a much better idea of what was going on. It was hard to understand her also, but not as difficult as before and she was very welcoming and friendly towards us. She made us dinner which were like deep fried quesadillas. They were really good, but it was a little bit of a guessing game because they all had different fillings in them. We talked a little more before Natalie and I were exhausted and retreated into our room at 8.
The next day we had a huge breakfast of tamales dulce (every meal was huge)and a hot drink made from corn called atolé. They make different flavors of it. We first had guayaba which is a small, sweet and a bit tart fruit I really like. Tamales Dulce are some sort of grain and sugar in corn husks and cooked. They were very good, though pink and I couldn’t figure out why.
We spent the morning with a group of students from a local high school, talking to them and then hiking up a super super steep path in the biological corridor. It was all loose dirt and a really wide path because it separated the two states of Mexico and Morelos (where Cuernavaca is) and also to stop a forest fire from spreading further. It was a short, but very difficult hike up, but we were rewarded with gorgeous views on all sides. Victor spoke to us about environmental issues and then we hurried down to make it back in time for lunch with our families. I pretty much ran the whole way down in switchbacks because if you tried to go slow it was like surfing in dirt and your shoes would fill with first.
COCK FIGHT
We had lunch with our families. Natalie and I went to a barbeque of lamb at Don Delfino’s house (the brother of our host), which was really delicious. After that our host mother was asking if we wanted to go somewhere and saying “muerto,” which I new meant death, “gallo,” which I didn’t know and “hijo,” which meant son. So we were very confused but nodded our heads in agreement anyway (we got really good at this). So we walk up and it’s like we’re walking into someone’s backyard and there are these two girls that say “15 pesos,” but my host mother said something really quick and we just went in. This is where the real shock was. There were mostly men, maybe a few women, all huddled around a large pen fenced in with wood. Inside the pen two men were pressing roosters faces together in the middle of the pen. One of the men was our host mother’s son. It was a really interesting atmosphere, everyone was very excited and eating and drinking and to the left there was a guy counting out money, and to the right a man announcing things threw a microphone. It was really crowded and Natalie and I sure stood out, being one of few women and also the only gringas.
The roosters (gallos!) wear these hooks around their legs and then they jump all over each other. It was really sad because they get really bloody from poking each other with the hooks. Everyone was cheering and I was trying really hard not to cringe and be that American who didn’t understand. We’ve talked a lot about being culturally relative and sensitive, but it’s hard to think about that in relation to something like animal cruelty.
Anyway, if one of the roosters gets too close to the other one’s neck then they separate them because if they get stabbed in the neck then they die right away. It’s like rounds in wrestling and in between one I saw them take a capful of Gatorade and poor it on the rooster’s head! Then they have it some to drink, which I thought was really hilarious. We asked about it later and they said, oh, it needs electrolytes. So I think Gatorade has a new commercial… Eventually the other rooster could no longer be made to stand up so they pronounced the son of my host mother the winner. He won a portion of the money that people had bet on his rooster winning. Before each rooster fight, the men show of their roosters and try to get everyone to bet on them. The next fight, the rooster’s neck got stepped on and it died right away, which was really bloody… then we left.
In the afternoon we had a lecture about environment from someone from the municipal government of the town. There’s basically two governments, the municipal which is what we would typically consider government and is more formal and then the communales, which is a group of leadership from the community that has been around for way longer than the formal government has. There is definitely a bit of a power struggle and tension between the two.
That night was better with the family because they both opened up more and it was quieter so we had more of a chance to just sit around and talk. After dinner we had quite an interesting shower experience. It was pouring rain, but we needed to go to her father’s house (Don Delfino’s) to take a shower because they didn’t have running water. The houses are neighbors.. kind of. Usually to get from on the other you need to walk around the block, but since it was raining we took a short cut… kind of. We went up stairs in the house and then out on the roof, across the roof, down a ladder, through a backyard and workshop and then finally into the house for a nice hot shower.
The next day we all loaded up into the back of a truck with a few of the students
from the day before and a bunch of tools to do some community service project with the communales (the other sector of gov). We went higher up into the mountains where it was freeeezing. There was even ice on the ground!! All of the men we worked with were men that use the land, to farm, harvesting dirt, or in other ways so they have to work to give back to it in order to get a permit they need to use the land. Each has a certain amount of area they have to maintain each week, by digging fire trenches and planting trees. We dug out a wide path so if a fire starts, it won’t got far. It was really hard work, but interesting to hear from all the men and so beautiful.We finished quicker than expected so went to this holy place with lakes in the
mountains for a little bit, just to hang out. It was really cheap to ride horses so a bunch of us all went for a ride on paths around in the mountains for about forty-five minutes. It was so beautiful and I’d never really ridden a horse before! Only ponies…Then we had a community lunch because it was the opening of a new community center/ theater of the communales. There was lots of live music and good food and almost the whole town came out. And lots of tequila of course… A priest also blessed the area with holy water.
AMATLAN
And then we were off to Amatlan which I think is probably my favorite place that we have been yet. It’s a little bit lower, but still in the mountains and really really beautiful, with reddish rocks kind of like the South West towering up from all the mountains that surround the small town. It’s a really gorgeous and supposedly sacred healing place. There aren’t really pictures because we were told it was considered somewhat offensive to take pictures since they consider it a real “taking” of something of the land and the people who live there. I saw this play out in mixed ways though, sometimes it really seemed so and other times people would say, take a picture, take a picture.
The family Natalie and I were with was really nice and their Spanish was much easier to understand. They also had a really nice house with running water, which was quite a luxury. It all seemed fairly new so I think it was partly from money from working in the states. It was a woman named Lucina, her husband Antonio and her two son. Antonio had worked in Atlanta and in Canada and one of her sons had just gotten home for the Christmas season, but was about to go back to Los Angeles to work again.Hearing stories about immigration and them walking through the desserts for three nights made it all hit really home. I knew it all happened before, but to have faces and names and stories makes me think about it all in such a different way.
We went to a party for a holiday that was that day at our host mother’s sister’s house. There was great live music, good food and it just a really great atmosphere. We stayed up pretty late talking with them about all different things. I felt much more at home there, which was a relief because I was so exhausted from the homestay before. Speaking Spanish either way is really tiring though, so we couldn’t stay up to late and were off to bed soon.
After I had been there for about three hours they started asking us what we were doing on Saturday. Natalie was going to Acapulco, but I wasn’t doing anything so I got invited to a wedding on Saturday. The culture here is very different. It’s only rude to bring uninvited guests if you bring more than five or so, other than that everyone just plans for a ton of people.
In the morning we talked with this man Nacho about indigenous rights and other issues facing the town, which was very interesting. Then we went to the fields on a women named Dona Irene who is very old and never married, but still plants her lands each year. After that we hiked up to the sacred spot in the mountains where two rocks meet. Nacho led us in a ceremony that was suppose to allow up to absorb all of the good energy of nature. I could really feel the tingling in my arms, it was so strange, comforting and relaxing all at the same time.
That night our host mother shower us how she makes money, which is by making boxes out of dried orange peels. They were beautiful, decorated with dried flowers. I painted a little bit, which they seemed interested in and then we talked about all different animals and I drew a few things to give her ideas for her boxes.
HACIENDA
We didn’t have much time in the morning, just enough to say goodbye and have breakfast (which is actually a huge meal) before setting off to Xoxicalco, which is an important archaeological site further South. It was beautiful and really impressive, especially the parts about the observatory and scientific calculations that they can’t even do today!
Then we were off to the hacienda, which was… finally… our break! The hacienda is huge and very very old. It kind of felt like something out of Disney world, like a colonial theme, but it wasn’t crowded and it was all actually realllly old. It was all built around the 1500s! After the revolution of 1910 many haciendas were sold because they were destroyed in the war and because the whole cause of the war was to take land ownership away from a small percent of the population
that did not rightfully own in the first place. It was a bunch of old buildings and then behind sweeping fields of mostly sugar cane under the mountains. It was so gorgeous. We had sessions in the morning, but the afternoons were left for us to relax by the pool and do other activities. There was a climbing wall, so I got to do that a little bit which was fun.Both mornings Betsy and I went on the most amazing run ever. I hadn’t exercised in a while, but it felt so great to run (helped it was flat too). I ran for like an hour and 15 minutes, which was probably about seven miles… and it felt so good. The sun was rising up over the mountains and everything was so beautiful.
It was nice to return back home to Cuernavaca and Casa CEMAL, which has really begun to feel like home. It was relaxing, though Betsy and I woke up early the next morning to take a bus to la boda (the wedding) in Amatlan.
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